🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

Blind geek, fanfiction lover (Harry Potter and MLP). keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ

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  • 314 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • This is a problem with Lemmy on the admin side. I set up retention, and any post here is automatically deleted if it’s more than a year old and nobody has interacted with it. But I had to write a lot of custom scripting to handle that, and it still screws up: I was somehow counting profile photos as posts, deciding they got no interaction, then deleting everyone’s profile photos. I fixed it, of course, but that isn’t something admins should have to handle from scratch, by hand, on every server. No instance owner can afford to store everything, forever, for free, for users. Especially in this market where memory and hard drives are soon going to cost as much as my house. This instance is funded entirely by me, at about $200 per month, located in a Canadian data center. But $200 is a hard cap; I need to find ways to ensure we stay within that monthly amount, or try and raise money from a collection of my fellow blind users, who likely have nothing to spare. This isn’t a beg post, just trying to give you insight into the realities of instance hosting. Right now Lemmy expects that all admins are okay with media and database storage that expands for ever and ever, infinitely. Most of us are not. Meaning that if we’re technical enough, we can write our own custom solutions to handle it. Or if we’re not, our only recourse is banning users to force Lemmy to delete whatever’s filling the disc.

    I’m a well federated instance, so I guess I could make a contract to sell all the data I get to an AI provider, and that would allow me to afford to store everything forever. But I’m not willing to do that, and I suspect if I tried every other instance would defederate us anyway.



  • Edit: autocorrect

    Another problem might be lack of algorithm. No, hear me out! Sure, the Algorithms on big social media lock us all in our little bubbles. But even there, I often have a moment of “Why on earth is that in my recommended?” I personally don’t care about e-sports, so I had absolutely no idea it was even happening anywhere on fedi, and would be unlikely to find out unless I went looking. I wonder how many sports enjoyers are on Lemmy, all assuming “Lemmy isn’t a sports place”, so they never look for sports content, and thus never find any? I enjoy a couple twitch streamers and some VTubers, so occasionally youtube goes “yolo” and throws some kind of e-sports thing my way. I never click it, but I am vaguely aware that DOTA2 is an esports thing that exists and people care about it, and sometimes a big event or tournament or something happens, and I could follow it on YouTube or Twitch if I wanted to. But because Lemmy has no algorithm and I would never subscribe to an e-sports sub myself, I’ll just never encounter it here.

    PS: I’m not old and out of touch. I’m completely blind and out of touch with esports because it intersects in zero ways with anything I can perceive, participate in, or care about. LOL



  • I think it’s just not having critical mass. I’m still stuck on Reddit for MLB stuff, because they have:

    • gameday threads with box scores that update in realtime
    • active conversation under each gameday thread

    The fediverse just doesn’t have that. Another issue is that inter-server federation slows things down. People are generally refreshing during the commercial breaks, and they want to see everyone’s takes and reactions on that last bad call right now, not in five minutes. In five minutes, the game has moved on. I wonder if building a cool sports app around matrix/xmpp would work better? The play by play feed could update instantly, conversations could be threaded around the plays, etc. It would also be easier to develop some kind of betting bot. Not for real money, of course, but a lot of my friends announce positions and we just track everyone’s win/lose rate in our local circle.

    To the folks saying it’s a demographics issue, not a tooling one: if that was the case, how come the fediverse has attracted a grand total of zero e-sports people? These are tech folks, often more closely aligned with our values than nascar guys for example, but the fediverse hasn’t attracted a single one. That’s what makes me think the problem is that it’s harder to have conversations around real-time data and events on the fediverse.


  • Part of me says some sort of meta tag in the page header might be better, defining what sort of activity this is, and then users install browser extensions made by the fediverse apps they use to interact with them. That way if a non-fediverse user clicks the link, they can still access whatever it is. But a fediverse user would get a prompt like “Open this (thread/user/hashtag) on your own instance so you can interact with it?” Or they could set the extension to just do that automaticly for them.











  • No. It’s explicitly anti-demon. I don’t like it, because I’m not the target market, but it’s fine. IMHO Hazbin Hotel is both much more offensive and much more dangerous. It twists pseudo-scriptural myths about Lilith and Lucifer into a pro-demon and pro-hell narrative. Even that would be fine if everyone realizes it’s just for fun. But it’s much closer to the line where these ideas can become part of the cultural understanding via osmosis, in the same way everyone thinks there were three wise men even though scripture doesn’t back this up in any way. But the kind of Christians who get offended by kpop demon hunters don’t care because the title isn’t shocking, so they let the things that are actually problems slip right past them without comment.


  • 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦AtoFediverse@lemmy.worldFederated Goodread ?
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    7 months ago

    The problem is that most data about books (ISBNs, DDC and LOC classification, cover images, synopsis, etc) are owned by either Amazon or Worldcat. So if you read anything even slightly off beat, you’ll be entering all of that data yourself. That also means recommendations aren’t really a thing. If you just want to track and share your reading, and don’t mind entering all the data yourself, bookwyrm is fine. But if you want to just search for a book and add it to your shelf, or get recommendations of new books, it’s nowhere near there.










  • If you want to get straight to the fun, I might recommend: https://cosmos-cloud.io/

    It will handle all of the uninteresting stuff like docker, reverse proxies, ssl certificates, etc. You can get straight to adding apps either by pasting in a docker-compose, or getting them straight from the cosmos marketplace.

    Also, it works with standard tools, so other than the reverse proxy, it’s easy to migrate away from if you want. I think the reverse proxy is just caddy, but I don’t know where the caddy config file goes or how to pull it out of the funky cosmos config format.